Ladies vs. Butlers Season 1 Episode 1: Boy Versus Lady Review

Ladies vs. Butlers Season 1 Episode 1: Boy Versus Lady Review

In the very high class private school, Hakureiryou, there is an upper class of students who are served and a lower class which are trained to serve them. This leads to a life of daily boredom for Selnia Iori Flameheart: just one little thing to make things interesting is all she needs. Luckily the school is about to receive a new transfer student by the name of Akiharu Hino.

After losing his family and gaining their inheritance, Akiharu is transferring in as the newest member of the servant training class. After spending ten minutes listening to Selnia whine audiences will watch Akiharu literally grope his way through a string of introductions to the rest of the female student body.

Good and the Bad

Every season there's at least one series which I will watch and then spend hours, sometimes days, trying to figure out what the hell I saw. Guess which series gets that honor this season? In the first episode of Ladies vs. Butlers, a few things are established very early. This is a series for those who enjoy large doses of slapstick comedy with a healthy side of ecchi. For the first half of the episode, the story revolves around Selnia Flameheart and her desperate need for something interesting to happen followed by ten minutes of Akiharu groping girls on accident. And that's about it.

Twenty minutes of the same three jokes being told over and over, this series is getting off to a terrible start. The one thing that it has going for it in the first episode is very nice animation throughout. Backgrounds and scenery look crisp and bright in most scenes though even this good point is sullied by an abundance of shadows being cast over characters. A few characters are introduced in this episode but it's hard to call any of them interesting this early on. While a couple of supporting characters are showing some early signs of being interesting (the eroge playing female principal made me chuckle a bit), weak leads have already started to weigh this series down.